The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,414 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 51% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 46% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.6 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 62
Highest review score: 100 Badlands
Lowest review score: 0 A Life Less Ordinary
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 5,571 out of 10414
  2. Mixed: 3,736 out of 10414
  3. Negative: 1,107 out of 10414
10414 movie reviews
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  1. Wuthering Heights
    Overlong and undersexed, Fennell’s version of Wuthering Heights betrays her audience of edgelords and perverts. Even stranger, those who have fostered a distaste for the filmmaker’s sensibility will similarly find themselves disappointed. It’s one thing to make art that can be read as indulgent, ill-conceived, and tasteless—it’s another to turn around and make something that’s just boring in comparison.
  2. The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare
    There’s no intentionality behind Ungentlemanly Warfare, no perspective or passion to drive what should be a gleefully schadenfreude-filled time at the movies. With the exception of a scene-stealing Danny Sapani, The Ministry Of Ungentlemanly Warfare is a forgettable action vehicle ferrying a gaggle of uninspired rascals.
  3. A Christmas Story Christmas
    The result is something that, while never reaching the ineffable magic of Clark’s film, ends up in solidly entertaining, if slightly disjointed, holiday territory.
  4. Almost Christmas
    Whatever its faults, this is a nice movie, a crowdpleaser best experienced with an appreciative audience.
  5. Becoming Jane
    The film tries to squeeze Austen into one of her novels, and the peg doesn't fit.
  6. Green Street Hooligans
    It loses its superficial charm during a labored third act that gets bogged down in tired, groan-inducing subplots.
  7. Taking Woodstock
    Lee’s movie is pleasant enough, but it’s too swept up in the spirit it’s celebrating to ask the relevant questions.
  8. The Relic
    The monster effects, as designed by Stan Winston, are stunners, but after Twister, it should be obvious that it's not the quality of the effects that matter so much as the quality of the film in which they appear.
  9. God Told Me To
    Ambitious in scale despite its modest budget, God Told Me To also established Cohen’s talent for getting a lot of bang for his limited buck. As a film about faith, it’s pure hooey, but it’s hooey with a provocative edge.
  10. The Eagle
    The formalities of the period dialogue and a wavering, inexplicable accent test him (Tatum) beyond his limits, and the film isn't thoughtful or original enough to survive it.
  11. The Devil All the Time
    What’s haunting about The Devil All The Time — and, ultimately even a little hopeful — is this idea that there’s a world beyond this world, where perhaps not everyone is so cruel or intense. It may not be the biblical Heaven; but that’s okay. Sometimes Cincinnati will suffice.
  12. The Brothers Bloom
    Johnson sets viewers up for greatness, but ultimately offers much milder pleasures. The film isn’t an outright con, but it’s easy to feel a little misled by the end.
  13. Cloud Atlas
    Measured scene by scene, the film isn't always successful, and its transcendent moments make it easy to wish it could reach that elevated pitch more often. But Cloud Atlas is the sort of work where the big picture matters more than the details. It's an imperfect film of great daring and tremendous humanity, a work of many stories, but a singular achievement.
  14. Clifford the Big Red Dog
    It’s harmless bad, not torture bad.
  15. Hitchcock
    Making his feature debut, director Sacha Gervasi follows up his fine documentary "Anvil: The Story Of Anvil" with another story about the perils of uncompromising creative endeavor, but his Hitchcock goes only a step beyond caricature.
  16. Never Let Go
    As recent horror offerings disproportionately lean toward disappointing remakes and tepid commentary on our modern way of life, it’s refreshing to encounter genre fare that is equal parts original and entertaining.
  17. J.T. Leroy
    This story remains fascinating, but the perspective here feels skewed.
  18. Resurrecting the Champ
    The cast is generally excellent, but Hartnett in particular comes across as convincingly complicated, alternately reprehensible and sympathetic.
  19. I Love You, Daddy
    Its refusal to over-simplify gives it the structure of a rough cut. Being a grown-up, as far as I Love You, Daddy is concerned, means picking your failures and frustrations; it picks to be too long and poky.
  20. It's About You
    It's About You's sound is relatively clean and dynamic, but there's nothing remotely resembling a narrative here.
  21. Hyde Park on Hudson
    Hyde Park On Hudson once again finds "Meatballs" star Bill Murray leading a populist, crowd-pleasing slobs-vs.-snobs comedy, but this time, his role as Roosevelt reflects his status as a silver-haired heavyweight thespian.
  22. Old
    The film has flashes of clumsiness that should be familiar to those who have stepped before into the Twilight Zone of its maker’s imagination. But Old is also, in its most intense moments, one of his most genuinely disturbing visions: a horror movie about that most universal of horrors, inescapable mortality.
  23. The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat
    As a dramatic interpretation of Moore’s characters and their hardships, it’s hard to think how a direct translation could much improve upon what Mabry and her cast have put on screen. But without that context, the cavalcade of pain is excessive, perhaps even bordering on farcical, without the breathing room that the novel’s prose provides.
  24. Dark Shadows
    Any proper adaptation of Dark Shadows, even one that acknowledges and celebrates its camp silliness as much as Burton's does, has to immerse itself in soap opera, too, and it's here that the director's lack of conviction becomes apparent.
  25. The Fall of the American Empire
    Eventually, both characters and narrative start to feel like an elaborate pretext for what’s really, at heart, a documentary about the various ways that wealthy corporations avoid paying taxes, combined with an earnest public-service message about helping the homeless. Those are admirable goals, but springing them on viewers via an entertaining bait-and-switch risks inspiring disappointment, or even provoking resentment.
  26. Ip Man: The Final Fight
    From fawning beginning to maudlin close, it’s a monotonous, wannabe-mythmaking biopic for Ip completists only.
  27. We Summon the Darkness
    The film is propelled by a confident lead performance from Alexandra Daddario.
  28. Eagle vs Shark
    Might feel like a colorful little train-wreck drama, but given the recent popularity of such films, it comes across more like a nerdcore clip show, a sort of straight-faced "Epic Movie" for fans of discomfort comedy.
  29. The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3
    Tony Scott’s bracingly awful remake/desecration of the classic ‘70s thriller.
  30. Short Cut to Nirvana: Kumbh Mela
    Inept.
  31. Porn Theater
    When Porn Theatre stays in the darkness, its minute observations about grindhouse culture are hypnotic in their accumulating detail.
  32. Below
    Twohy and co-screenwriters Darren Aronofsky and Lucas Sussman don't show their hand until late in the film, but by that time, Below has grown slack and silly.
  33. Camp
    Camp offers plenty of reasons to bristle at its cheery shamelessness, but it's too high-spirited and charming to resist.
  34. Street Kings
    After all the actorly fireworks, Street Kings concludes that the LAPD is an institution where even the well-intentioned can't work clean. Okay. What else?
  35. Union Square
    There isn't much to Union Square, but the movie does understand how people want to love their families on their own terms, forgetting that their families may be the only ones who really know who they are.
  36. Money Monster
    Foster, a novice at suspenseful filmmaking, doesn’t seem to know which screws to tighten or if screws even need tightening at all.
  37. Yesterday
    Yesterday, Boyle’s new Beatles-centric dramedy, comes closer than he’s ever dared before — which makes this likable, hummable movie particularly disappointing when it fails to ignite the pop fireworks of his best work.
  38. Ambulance
    Ambulance is boilerplate Michael Bay, a thrill ride full of muscle and testosterone and style.
  39. The Purge: Election Year
    For all its flaws, Election Year has those baseline pleasures associated with violent American B-movies of the 1970s and ’80s — that mix of simplicity and scuzzy, juicy execution.
  40. Seven Years in Tibet
    Annaud has given Seven Years In Tibet an epic scope, packed with beautiful scenery, lush costumes, and elaborate sets. Which would all be well and good if they didn't often seem like the reason the movie exists.
  41. The Boogeyman
    These are jump scares done right, where the struggle to see what’s there is much more effective than any cheap lurch into frame.
  42. Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase
    It’s a watchably low-key family adventure, but that’s a low bar to clear for Nancy Drew, so well-suited to function as a gateway text—to Sherlock Holmes, Veronica Mars, Philip Marlowe, Brick, House, Encyclopedia Brown fanfic... almost anything involving advanced noticing.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    The Assault
    Brisk and technically efficient, The Assault is a dull film based on a real event that certainly wasn't.
  44. Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist
    It may not have been what the producers had in mind, but they asked for a Paul Schrader movie, and that's exactly what he delivered.
  45. Wendy
    It suggests that Zeitlin, throwing more handfuls of fairy dust over an impoverished American South, is something of a lost boy himself. Like Pan and his posse, he stubbornly refuses to grow.
  46. The Greatest Game Ever Played
    As Ouimet, the always-terrific Shia LeBeouf is an oasis of depth in a film that otherwise can't pass up a sports-film cliché.
  47. Hellion
    Occasionally, the viewer gets the sense that the camera’s jittery swaying is meant to draw attention from the film’s clunkiness. Fragrance is a poor substitute for depth.
  48. I Can Do Bad All by Myself
    With Bad, Perry is savvy enough to let riveting musical numbers by ringers like Gladys Knight and Mary J. Blige--along with Henson’s deeply empathetic performance--carry the film’s feverish emotions more than his characteristically ham-fisted screenplay.
  49. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
    The film has any number of chances to exploit the setting and Butterfield's wide-eyed innocence, but instead, it mines a vast, eerie tension by keeping both boys in the dark.
  50. Jackie & Ryan
    The cross-cutting duet it builds to, with two people singing the same song separated by hundreds of miles, is a nice musical moment, but just that: a moment. Ideally, even a low-key romantic drama should have more than one.
  51. The Truth About Charlie
    Though indisputably a thriller, Charlie abandons itself to little cinematic rhapsodies, self-reflexive asides, and montages of Paris locations cued to a soundtrack of cool French pop, all of which often seems more vital than the main order of business.
  52. P.S.
    While not dwelling on plot eventually gets P.S. in trouble during the slack finale, it gives Linney and Grace plenty of room to maneuver.
  53. Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy
    I wish the film had made its points a little more artfully and implicitly, rather than simply sticking them in McDonald and McKinney’s mouths, but Brain Candy has an overarching satirical vision that makes it much more than just an assemblage of mostly funny running gags and stand-alone bits.
  54. 2 Guns
    As in "Contraband," Kormákur offers a hint of a political statement, in this case about the inherent potential for corruption whenever competing government agencies are operating in international territory. But it doesn’t quite make it. On almost every level, 2 Guns is content to be as flavorless and forgettable as its title.
  55. Legend
    When the two Krays are in the same room, circling each other with a mix of fraternal affection and deep loathing, Legend is as heady and unforgettable as it means to be. The rest of the time, it’s a movie with a lot of good points, but no connecting line.
  56. Don't Come Knocking
    It's a beautiful mess, but it's a mess all the same.
  57. About Time
    The movie is written and directed by the British filmmaker Richard Curtis, who specializes in fantasies — the dozen intersecting rom-coms of "Love Actually" the fairy-tale courtship of "Notting Hill", the endless receptions of "Four Weddings And A Funeral." At a glance, About Time appears to be of a piece with those crowd-pleasers.
  58. Mr. & Mrs. Smith
    Plays like an old-fashioned romantic comedy with updated hardware.
  59. Mao's Last Dancer
    It's artless, obvious, and at times insultingly exaggerated. And yet the real-life story of Chinese ballet dancer Li Cunxin, based on his autobiography, is often dramatic enough to win its way past the silly trappings.
  60. Safe
    The character-building is proffered in bad faith, like every scene in Safe that doesn't involve bloodshed. Statham can sell a punch, but not his own vulnerability.
  61. The Visit
    A refreshing (and memorably strange) genre piece, premised almost entirely on a child’s willingness to accept grown-up weirdness as long as it ensures stability.
  62. Nim's Island
    Directors Jennifer Flackett and Mark Levin deliver some eye-catching fantasy sequences in the early scenes, but the film grows more mundane and the tone more uneven as it goes on.
  63. Megalopolis
    Megalopolis is a magical, meandering, maddening construction, one that demonstrates that the process of experimentation is in and of itself both deeply entwined with, as well as above, dualistic notions like success and failure.
  64. The Hundred-Foot Journey
    This innocuous crowd-pleaser delivers everything that its pedigree and ad campaign promise, courting the patronage of foodies, Oprah Book Club members, Travel Channel subscribers, and Helen Mirren lovers alike.
  65. Aquaman
    It owns up to its cheese.
  66. Arkansas
    While Arkansas is a promising and often very entertaining first feature, Duke doesn’t combine these borrowed ingredients—excellent though they are—into a fully realized original story, with its own personality.
  67. Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts
    As fascinating as Glass often is, it's simultaneously too conventional and not conventional enough.
  68. Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny
    From the looks of it, a good 90 percent of The D's creative juices were expended on The Pick Of Destiny's brilliant opening sequence.
  69. Violent Night
    It’s a premise that’s just clever enough to work; although too many anachronistically cheery needle drops during gruesome fight sequences abound, there’s plenty to milk from the juxtaposition of family-friendly Christmas spirit and R-rated action and comedy.
  70. Love Actually
    Provides enough happy endings to make the audience forget that romance and Christmas miracles don't always work out.
  71. 3
    All this experimentation is enjoyable enough in the moment, but it's disappointing when Tykwer drops it in favor of a conventional, obvious ending.
  72. Reality
    A viewer can’t help but take it as an artistic statement, even though nothing — not even the nods to Mulholland Dr. — suggests that Dupieux’s motivated by anything more than a hankering to make something weird and funny. He succeeds on the first part, and fitfully accomplishes the second.
  73. NOW: In the Wings on a World Stage
    It’s a thoroughly upbeat paean to the magic (and the hard work) of theater, with not so much of a hint of discord—of mild interest to aficionados and Spacey fans, but almost terminally bland.
  74. The Command
    It doesn’t help that The Command looks phony right from the outset, being an English-language film involving virtually no actual Russians.
  75. The Gambler
    In any case, none of the gambles Jim makes over the course of the movie are as ballsy as the film’s casting strategy. Will audiences really buy Mark Wahlberg as a wordsmith too brilliant for academia? Smart money says no.
  76. Mr. Harrigan's Phone
    Though its narrative contains some subtleties, and Hancock’s aesthetic polish gives it a nice gloss, the picture’s pacing and character-driven momentum frequently sputters, ultimately leading to diminished results.
  77. The Four Seasons
    Astonishingly boring.
  78. The Flash
    It’s sometimes buried under layers and layers of storytelling knots that the film never fully untangles, but the fun is there, and when the film is really working, that turns out to be enough.
  79. The Acid House
    The Acid House comes across as a shadow of "Trainspotting," albeit a vibrant, noisy, frantic shadow.
  80. Casa de los babys
    It's a bit more than the film can handle without leaving loose ends dangling, and though it's never preachy, Sayles' political message-sending sometimes comes across too clearly for its own good. He makes valid points, though, particularly when he lets his storytelling do the work for him.
  81. Starsky & Hutch
    A textbook example of how a remade '70s show can feel like an enjoyable lark rather than cultural recycling run amok.
  82. Freeze Frame
    Compelling as it sounds, the idea behind Freeze Frame doesn't make any sense, especially when realized in practical terms.
  83. Spirited
    While not without some issues, the movie lands as a modern-day fable whose colorfully packaged and exuberantly pitched life lessons carry an undeniable timeliness.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Beloved
    Honoré's combination of contemporary romantic hijinks and the stylization inherent in the musical genre aren't juxtaposed ironically: Beloved is a tenderly sincere musical that celebrates love even as it acknowledges the ways in which it can sometimes lead to tragedy.
  85. Zombieland: Double Tap
    Unfortunately, the decade that passed between the two films was long enough for the approach to grow tiresome.
  86. Promised Land
    No one seems to recognize the irony of making a film about corporate rigging that is itself outrageously rigged.
  87. Agora
    Weisz makes for a vivid, charismatic Hypatia, but the script lets her down.
  88. The Croods
    The film itself doesn’t practice what it preaches: From the typically blocky DreamWorks CGI to the emphasis on bruising slapstick over verbal wit, The Croods takes the low road at every opportunity, giving lip service to enlightenment while following a Flintstonian instinct to keep punching the clock at the quarry.
  89. I Heart Huckabees
    One of the boldest, most audacious American movies of the last 25 years, a freewheeling cerebral carnival of energy and ideas, if not always coherence or cohesion.
  90. The House Bunny
    Faris has mostly logged time in dire vehicles like The House Bunny, which are dumb-dumb to her smart-dumb.
  91. Rendition
    With a cast this stacked, the performances are predictably strong (particularly from Sarsgaard, whose slow-burning role recalls his work in Shattered Glass), but the first impression they make is the same as the last.
  92. Trolls
    Trolls may have a low bar going in, but the movie scales it quickly and admirably by defying conventions, adding both new and familiar musical numbers, and hiding a valuable, Zen-like message in plain sight.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Perfect Sense
    The perseverance of McGregor's restaurant, in spite of its apparent inutility in the changing world, ends up having more poignancy than his parting and reuniting with the glowering Green.
  94. Ice Princess
    Ice Princess will probably connect most strongly with kids who have yet to develop an awareness of sports- and family-film clichés.
  95. Torn Curtain
    Despite some weaknesses, the film remains a bold and challenging work, one that flies in the face of the conventional spy thrillers of its day.
  96. Bingo Hell
    A sometimes clunky but always bold blend of social satire and delirious style.
  97. Hobo with a Shotgun
    It's a hyper-violent, self-conscious throwback, with the sickly plastic aroma of a tape that's been gathering dust in the corner of a video store since 1984.
  98. Love and Other Drugs
    When Gyllenhaal stops selling out, the movie starts.
  99. Playing by Heart
    Playing By Heart covers a broad, multi-generational spectrum of romantic and familial relationships, but Carroll can't resist tying everything together in a shiny red bow. The result is daytime television at its most ambitious, an entire season's worth of flavorless melodrama and placating warmth.
  100. Take the Lead
    Corny and uncool. Initially, it doesn't matter. Banderas is so winning in the lead that the film's early scenes are almost as persuasive as one of his lectures.
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